Lost underground Manchester club with six dancefloors 'like Aliens movie lair'

A Manchester basement club which boasted a string of bars and six dancefloors has been described as looking like something out of the space horror movie, Aliens.

In the 1970s, extravagantly dressed clubbers would walk down stairs to the underground club in Fennel Street. Describing Pips in an interview with the MEN in 2017, ex-Stone Roses DJ Dave Booth said it looked like the set of the classic James Cameron movie.

Dave said: "It was like walking onto the set of James Cameron’s Aliens movie. It was like the lair from the end of that movie, with stalactites and caves hidden in corners. It was loved by a lot of people.”

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To access the basement club, you would walk through huge black double doors and down 20 or so perilous steps. Walking past the paying-in kiosk the club was split into two.

There was an upstairs room to the left, but on the right past the cloakroom were stairs down to the commercial room and past that lay the infamous Roxy room. Pips opened in 1972 - ten years before Tony Wilson’s Factory records opened Fac 51.

Some now regard Pips as being as influential on Manchester's music scene as the legendary Hacienda club which opened 10 years later. Not so much for dance music, but rather the goth, glam rock, new wave and new romantic scenes that came before.

Speaking to the MEN, Dave said: "Pips was the original club. It opened in '72, 10 years before the Hacienda. This is predating Blitz Club in London. The Blitz opened in 1980 so that’s eight years after."

The Blitz night in London was a meeting of New Romantics at numerous Roxy and David Bowie nights. Boy George, Billy Idol and Tony Hadley were faces of this scene.

Dave added: